Grange Park Opera's latest plans, plus a reader offer for the 2018 season

Grange Park Opera is now seeking support for phase two of the development at its new location – and you can help.

Grange Park Opera
(Image credit: Grange Park Opera)
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This summer, Grange Park Opera welcomed more than 14,000 visitors to its spectacular debut season at West Horsley Place, in the Surrey Hills, making use of its brand new 700-seat Theatre in the Woods, which was created entirely by private donations and built in the space of 11 months.

Founded in 1998 by Wasfi Kani, Grange Park is now seeking support for phase two of the development at its new location; it requires £4 million to enhance the opera house, with cross-gartered exterior brickwork, a fanfare balcony, larch cladding around the dressing rooms and tweaks to the interior staircases and vestibules under the expert eye of Nicky Haslam, plus a £2.5 million endowment designed to ensure the future of the company.

The centrepiece of phase two will be the creation of a ‘marvellous Lavatorium Rotundum: a circular masterpiece of a lavatory, built around a black poplar tree in the venerable orchards of West Horsley Place’.

The plan is to have everything in place in time for the 2018 season (June 7 to July 14), which will include Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!, Gounod’s heart-rending Roméo et Juliette and Verdi’s tale of intrigue, Un Ballo in Maschera.

Visit www.grangeparkopera.co.uk/spend-a-penny to find out more about the campaign.

Country Life readers with Christmas shopping in mind can benefit from a ticket offer for the 2018 season: two tickets, a complimentary programme and a bottle of Laurent-Perrier Brut Champagne for £350. Visit www.grangeparkopera.co.uk/christmas.

Annunciata Elwes
Annunciata Elwes

Annunciata grew up in the wilds of Lancashire and now lives in Hampshire with a husband, two daughters and an awful pug called Parsley. She’s been floating round the Country Life office for more than a decade, her work winning the Property Magazine of the Year Award in 2022 (Property Press Awards). Before that, she had a two-year stint writing ‘all kinds of fiction’ for The Sunday Times Travel Magazine, worked in internal comms for Country Life’s publisher (which has had many names in recent years but was then called IPC Media), and spent another year researching for a historical biographer, whose then primary focus was Graham Greene and John Henry Newman and whose filing system was a collection of wardrobes and chests of drawers filled with torn scraps of paper. During this time, she regularly gave tours of 17th-century Milton Manor, Oxfordshire, which may or may not have been designed by Inigo Jones, and co-founded a literary, art and music festival, at which Johnny Flynn headlined. When not writing and editing for Country Life, Annunciata is also a director of TIN MAN ART, a contemporary art gallery founded in 2021 by her husband, James Elwes.

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